Tom
Wolfe is outraged! Outraged and hurt! The Man in the Ice Cream Suit
is - let’s start manhandling our metaphors here - losing his cool!
Righteous dismay! He’s sat seething behind his stockade of impeccably-tailored
white flannel but no more! Petty, pusillanimous postmodernists! Bloodless
academics and the leering champions of defeatism sucking hollow the soul
of American triumph! Quake and scatter! Tom Wolfe has a new book,
Hooking
Up, out now! O crabbed and crapulous creatures of the lacklustre
literary high ground! Shiver in your bolt-holes! Norman Mailer! John
Updike! John Irving! Tom Wolfe has a new book out, on Farrar, Straus
& Giroux! You literary pygmies masticating the sacred word in your
fusty cubicles at the venerable New Yorker! Consider yourself J’Accused!!

I could
go on like this, but it gets tiresome pretty quickly, and even Tom Wolfe
knows this. Hooking Up opens up with an incredulous monologue on
the state of America today, from Wolfe’s perspective, and the themes he
throws up, prime among which is a diatribe against the soul-sapping diminishment
of meaning he pins squarely on Derrida, Foucault and their fashionable
academic followers, will show up later in the book.

It’s a
fantastic polemic, all the more enjoyable for anyone edging out of the
youth demographic and finding themselves occasionally dismayed by the spectacle
of youth culture. Examine that last sentence carefully, for it contains
a revelation, though not a major one for those who have followed Mr. Wolfe’s
career for the past two decades: Tom Wolfe, iconoclast and essayist of
the evolving American Century, has firmly taken up a position on the rear
guard.

Perhaps
this would explain why the least interesting part of the book is the one
that’s been getting the most press (excerpted in a recent National Post,
for instance) - his attack on the attack made on his last novel, A Man
in Full, by Mailer, Updike and Irving. It’s clearly the beating heart
of the book, the nuclear core padded and packed with a few good magazine
pieces, an entertaining bit of novella, and an ancient, quaint attack on
The
New Yorker of three-and-a-half decades past.

Wolfe might
have drawn a bit more blood if his dissection of each writer’s style went
a bit more deeply - as it is, his description of Irving’s limpid perturbations
of Northeastern despair in A Widow For One Year is priceless; incredulous
and howling, full of partisan contempt. In the end, though, the essay reads
like a metaphorical contretemps after a few too many Glenmorangies in the
oak bar of the Arts and Letters Club.